XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a text-based language that is commonly used for defining data elements in Web or e-commerce documents. XML is an open standard promulgated by the World Wide Web consortium, or “W3C”, which is an international industry consortium that develops common standards for the World Wide Web. XML uses a similar tag structure as HTML (HyperText Markup Language); however, whereas HTML defines how elements are displayed, XML defines what those elements contain. HTML uses predefined tags, but XML allows tags to be defined by the developer of the page. Thus, virtually any data items can be identified through XML.
As a text-based language, XML code is passed through a parser during execution. The parsing process takes time. Unfortunately, in certain situations, the delay caused by parsing the XML code may not be acceptable. One such situation is found in the video game context. Today, sophisticated video games are written in C/C++ and utilize XML for the data storage format to facilitate efficient design and debugging across a large group of developers. However, loading an XML-based video game during runtime may result in a noticeable or longer-than-desired delay from the game player's perspective. It would be desirable to shorten the load time for video games written in XML.